Guidance for Educators: Finding the Passion

Transcript:

Welcome, all. Please feel free to share this with your colleagues, if you think it would be of value to them.

I want to talk today about passion. It’s really important that your passion for your subject is conveyed to your students. Even if there is something about your subject that you don’t particularly find interesting, you might find it a little bit dull, even, it’s really important that you look deep inside and find the nugget of passion for that particular topic or that particular lesson because if you don’t, you risk losing your students’ engagement with you.

So, think back to a situation where you have yourself had a teacher tutor, or lecturer, that you thought was exceptional. You may remember everything that happened in this session. You may have looked forward to going to those particular sessions. What was it about that particular lecturer, or tutor, sis that proved so effective? When I’ve done this exercise with, academics as part of academic professional development, almost without exception, they would say, actually it was the passion. It was the passion of the teacher for that particular discipline. Sometimes that specific lecture, sometimes that series of lectures, that course.

And so I think it’s really important that you do look to find that moment of passion within anything that you’re teaching. So, sometimes that can be quite difficult, and you may need to about, sometimes a very small, aspect of the entire topic that you think is a point of passion, and you build from that. Because it’s your passion for the subject that will allow you to get your students engaged. It will allow them to be more receptive to the enlightenment that you are going to share with them, and it’s also going to mean that you are more likely to be able to give them the empowerment, to go forward, to think about what they’re going to do with that learning later.

So your learning needs to engage, enlighten and empower. And, I personally found it quite hard on occasion to find that point of passion and it’s worth literally thinking, just before the session, “what’s the one thing that I’m going to share with my students in this session?” That sparks other people’s passions. What other researchers, other academics, whatever thinkers have spun off that particular point?. And if you don’t have anything, particularly that, you find passionate, you can convey the passion of others, but it’s really important that there is passion in any teaching session.

So you might want to try that. Let me know how it goes.

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Be well.